Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you probably heard about the special Saturday Night Live40th Anniversary special that aired this past Sunday night. It was a three and a half hour trip down memory lane, featuring a true dream-team of comedy’s elite.

Among the many highlights came early in the show when a 5-minute video montage was shown of cast members’ first auditions. Not fake auditions, like we’ve seen in the past. The actual, real auditions for stars like Will Ferrell, Bill Hader, Amy Poehler, Jimmy Fallon as well as classic cast members like Dan Aykroyd, Chevy Chase, Gilda Radner and John Belushi. Here, you can see them in the auditions that would change their lives forever. It’s pretty special.

As a bonus though, there are also auditions from people who didn’t make the cut. They’re people you’ve definitely heard of who auditioned, but didn’t make the show.

Below, check out the Saturday Night Live auditions video as well a few of the other highlights from the special including Celebrity Jeopardy, Wayne’s World and more. Read More »

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Stephen Colbert is finishing up his long run on The Colbert Report, and the guy is going out with a bang. Colbert is a tolkien super-fan — his enthusiasm for Tolkien got him a role in The Hobbit, and has seen him grace the cover of Entertainment Weekly in costume as several Hobbit characters. One of his last interviews is among his biggest, as he got the dragon Smaug to show up for a chat. To the credit of everyone involved, from the WETA animation team to Smaug mo-cap and voice actor Benedict Cumberbatch, this goes all the way. A couple jokes edge toward serious territory, but they play right into Colbert’s long-standing conservative character. And Cumberbatch, er, Smaug, gets in a few choice lines at the expense of his Hobbit co-stars. Below, check out the video in which Colbert interviews Smaug.

This week filmmaker Christopher Nolan appeared on The Colbert Report. I wanted to spotlight this interview because Christopher Nolan usually doesn’t do fun talk shows like Colbert, and Stephen gets the almost-always-serious Nolan to swear and talk on a more down to earth level. I know that Nolan is very picky about which outlets he does interviews with (rumor has it he hates online blogs, which is why you almost never see him talk 1:1 with anything but print and television press) so for him to accept an interview with Stephen Colbert likely means he’s watched the show (he tells Colbert he’s also a big fan of his in the quick intro). My favorite moment comes when Colbert takes Nolan to task for making him think in a big blockbuster space epic, asking “Guardians of the Galaxy didn’t make me do that… why do you want to make me think? Why can’t you have shit just blow up?” Watch the full Christopher Nolan Colbert Report Interview embedded after the jump.

The Internet had two major points of contention with the Star Wars: The Force Awakens trailer. One was horribly racist and the other was incredibly nit picky. The nit picky one is about the new Sith lightsaber seen in the trailer. Many people are complaining that the construction simply doesn’t make sense. That the small sections pointing out of the hilt wouldn’t serve any positive purpose. And who knows? Maybe they’re right. The fact is, the movie doesn’t come out for a year so that may even be a plot point in the film.

Either way, Stephen Colbert has had enough. He explained why the new lightsaber would work, and is awesome, on Monday’s episode of The Colbert Report. The host also revealed he’s been a Star Wars fan longer than anyone. Below, watch the Stephen Colbert Star Wars video and see a few of the memes that the new lightsaber has spawned. Read More »

San Diego Comic-Con isn’t for another few days, but Marvel’s getting a head start on building buzz. Yesterday, the comic book publisher took to The View to introduce the new, female Thor, and today they’re plotting to drop another big reveal on The Colbert Report.

Marvel’s Joe Quesada will be stop by the Comedy Central talk show to announce “all-new comic book title and all-new era for one of Marvel’s most classic Super Heroes.” What could it be? Speculate with us after the jump.

So #CancelColbert worked, if not in quite the way anyone envisioned. Stephen Colbert will become the next host of The Late Show on CBS, taking over after David Letterman departs in 2015. This raises many questions, most notably: will Colbert cast aside the conservative parody character he created to host The Colbert Report on Comedy Central? (Update: The answer to that seems to be yes, according to the Wall St. Journal, which reports that Colbert “will retire the character he plays on his Comedy Central show.”)

Colbert did say, “I’m thrilled and grateful that CBS chose me. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to go grind a gap in my front teeth.”

David Letterman has announced he will retire in 2015. The announcement was made during a taping of The Late Show on Thursday, April 3rd 2014. In October it was announced that Letterman had extended his Late Show hosting contract through 2015, and many suspected that this would be his last run behind the desk. At the time, Letterman joked via a press release that “[CBS CEO] Les [Moonves] and I had a lengthy discussion, and we both agreed that I needed a little more time to fully run the show into the ground.” With Jay Leno’s departure from the late night landscape, the late night wars have seemed rather uninteresting.

As Stephen Colbert, the bombastic host of The Colbert Report, Stephen Colbert says a lot of things that Stephen Colbert, comedian and family man, might not necessarily agree with. But one thing neither version of Colbert has ever been fake about is his enduring love for Middle-earth. No less an authority than Peter Jackson has declared Colbert the biggest “Tolkien geek” he’s ever met.

This year, Colbert’s decades-long obsession culminated in an actual role in the latest installment of Jackson’s Tolkien franchise, The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug. But you’d be forgiven if you failed to notice — Colbert, along with his family, appears for just the blink of an eye. Hit the jump to check out their cameos in GIF form.